James Swallow: Deus Ex: Icarus Effect

She squeezed the trigger bar and a smoking dart chugged out into the air, skipping off the bar in a blare of sputtering phosphorous. Federova went for cover as the flare ignited the bourbon spills and carried on across the room, battering itself against the inside of the windows. Orange smoke, acrid and cloying, choked the air.

Coughing, Anna fired off another shot and clipped the Tyrant woman with it. Federova’s bolero jacket instantly caught alight, red flames leaping up at her face.

Through the thickening haze and shrieking of the trapped flares, Anna stumbled blindly toward the windows, desperate to escape. Behind her, she heard the tinkle of breaking glass and the crackling chugs of a fire taking hold, as one of the couches became a torch.

Federova came out of the roiling smoke ahead of her, a furious revenant blocking her path. Her skin seared and her face twisted in hate, the Tyrant looked like something spat from the fangs of hell.

The stolen jet ski rode low and fast over the wave tops, leaving the water in skipping blasts of power as it skimmed across the wake of the Icarus. The stern of the yacht loomed high before Saxon, just as a glint of bright light flashed along the mid-deck. For a moment, he thought it was a reflection from the sun, but then it happened again, and this time thin plumes of orange smoke coiled from the cracked windows.

Saxon twisted the throttle and gunned the motor, bringing the jet ski around to approach from the near side, where the haze would hide his approach.

The voice on the radio repeated itself in French, English, and Mandarin, warning the Icarus to cut power and heave to, by the authority of the Swiss civil police.

Namir’s lip curled and he silenced the speaker, shooting an angry glare across the yacht’s flying bridge as Barrett entered.

The big man’s face was thunderous, and his scarred cheek was red with lines of blood, spilled like tear tracks from his eye. “What the hell is going on down there?” he demanded, jerking a thumb toward the aft. “The fire alarms are going crazy! Kelso wasn’t on the mid-deck, so—”

“Yelena has her,” Namir snapped. “She’s cleaning up your mess.”

“The bitch got the drop on me!” Barrett roared.

“Imbecile!” Namir shot back, with such force that the other man fell silent. “You underestimated the woman and she made you pay for it!”

Coils of smoke, black threads joining the flare fumes, drifted past on the wind. Fire-suppressor lights blinked across the control boards and Namir could hear an alarm bell ringing somewhere beneath them. He advanced to the helm control and pulled the throttle levers back to the zero mark.

“What are you doin’?” said Barrett. “Where’s the pilot?”

Namir nodded toward the rearward sky deck where the unmarked Tyrant veetol was waiting. “He’s warming up the helo. We’re abandoning ship.” He ground out the words in annoyance. “This operation is turning into a clusterfuck! We have to extract now, while we can still salvage something.” He glared out of the bridge’s canopy. “Police launches are on the way. Our mission security has been compromised. Apparently someone alerted them as to our extralegal status.”

“Saxon?”

“Does it matter?” he snarled. “Our objective was achieved, even if Taggart didn’t die. The Humanity Front is in disarray, the media will report what we want them to say. We are done here.”

“We’re just gonna cut and run?” Barrett replied. “First we lose the jet and now this tub?”

“Let it burn,” Namir told him. “The cost is nothing against the gains. We’ll be across the border before the Swiss realize what has happened, and by the time they’ve doused the flames, the group will spin the truth to whatever best suits their needs.”

Federova’s fingers were like iron rods where they bored into Anna’s flesh through the smoke-dirtied sleeves of her blouse, and each motion of her pushing and shoving her across the decks was a new flash of pain. The assassin worked a nerve point in her arm and it was like her skin had been doused in acid.

She gasped and kept moving, tasting blood in her mouth. Anna caught a brief glimpse of herself in the curve of the Icarus’s gray glass windows as she passed; once upon a time she would have loved to find herself walking the decks of an elegant vessel like this, but now she looked like an apparition, some walking wounded left behind by the passing of a war.

Federova marched her to the upper tier and shoved her forward. The wind across the open sky deck caught her and she staggered. Across the flat space, the unmarked black flyer that had gathered her up from the Mont Blanc bridge was poised, ready for takeoff, rotor rings humming at idle. Namir and Barrett were waiting, and the big man’s face lit up with a dark, hateful smile as he saw her approach. He took a step forward, flexing the thick, heavy digits of his machine hands.

Anna tried to back away, but there was nothing behind her but a curved line of steel rail and the slope of the flying bridge. The silhouette of the yacht angled away down to the main deck and the prow, the profile like a knife blade edge-on. Smoke wreathed the drifting vessel.

Namir held up a hand to halt Barrett before he could tear his payback from her. “I want Kelso intact,” she heard him say, over the drone of the rotors. “If we can’t interrogate her here, we’ll do it at a black site.”

“No…” She struggled again as Barrett grabbed her and pulled her along until she was almost off her feet. “No!” Anna threw punches and kicks, but they battered off the other man without effect.

A dark pit of terror opened up inside her chest. Until this moment, Anna had been able to hold on to the thinnest thread of hope, the slimmest chance that she could still find a way to escape from the Tyrants and survive. That hope disintegrated as she was dragged toward the helo, the hard, unflinching certainty falling down upon her that she would have no future, no respite, no escape—

“Hey!” Ahead, Namir rapped on the cockpit hatch, calling to the pilot. “Answer me!” He tugged at the handle and the canopy opened; the pilot’s lifeless body shifted and spilled out onto the helipad. The dead man’s neck was canted at an unnatural angle.

Anna saw a figure drop from the cover of the tail fin and jam a shotgun barrel into the meat of Namir’s neck.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” said Saxon.

M V Icarus— Lake Geneva—Switzerland

Namir froze, the weapon resting at the base of his skull; even with the nonlethal rounds loaded in the shotgun, a blast from point-blank range would still be enough to put him down.

“Benjamin…” He let out a sigh. “I take it Scott won’t be making the rendezvous, then?”

“You’ll see him soon enough.” Saxon’s finger tightened on the trigger. Adrenaline and pain coursed through him, and he had to work to keep himself in check; all he wanted was to kill the man in front of him. But he had come this far, and across the sky deck he saw Barrett hoist Kelso off her feet, holding her in front of him like a human shield.

“Do you really want to do this now?” Namir asked him, his tone almost reasonable. “You can’t win this.”

Saxon’s eyes narrowed. “Your wife. Your kids. Do they know what kind of man you are, Namir?” he snarled. “Do they know how much blood there is on your hands?”

Namir’s voice was ice cold. “If you were a smarter man, you would understand. Every life I’ve taken has been to make theirs better. You and the woman? That’s a cost I’ll pay without even a moment of doubt.”